Time Shelter is so remarkably clever that its cleverness became a distraction to me. I never felt there was a human connection to be found in the happTime Shelter is so remarkably clever that its cleverness became a distraction to me. I never felt there was a human connection to be found in the happenings on the pages--it was just a story. However witty the flourishes the effect as a whole was a little airless and self-referential. I wanted it to matter more. Just now my thoughts zinged in the direction of Saramago, an author whose books are also often dependent on incredibly clever intellectual absurdities like 'what if everyone went blind?' or 'what if everyone stopped dying?' or 'what if the Iberian Peninsula broke off the European continent?--and yet somehow these absurdities lead the author to such profound meditations on humanity. This novel amazed me just as much as those. But I wanted also to be moved....more
"Here's how it is: The country where I was born no longer exists."
Gorgeous, attentive, precise, subtle, meaningful. Every sentence carried me softly i"Here's how it is: The country where I was born no longer exists."
Gorgeous, attentive, precise, subtle, meaningful. Every sentence carried me softly into a greater understanding of not just one boy's life, but also of the turbulent tragic time through which he and his family lives. Reading this novel took concentration but the payoff was incalculable....more
This was a strange read. I was looking forward to a synthesis of European history, a quick overview that would glue my patchwork understandings into aThis was a strange read. I was looking forward to a synthesis of European history, a quick overview that would glue my patchwork understandings into a comprehensible pattern. I had a few very specific goals, too: I wanted a better understanding of European Jewry across the centuries, and I wanted enough knowledge to put Charles V's sack of Rome in 1527 in context, and maybe someone would finally explain the Thirty Years War to me...But what is meant to be an overview and correction of European history felt agonizingly superficial. It felt like I'd been handed a box that had all the pieces of a million-piece puzzle in it but it was still up to me to put it together. There is a strong chronology but Davies can't help interrupting his own story to make ahistorical connections with other eras and by the end I was very irritable....more
Zing, zing, zing...this novel gripped me in exactly the way I love in a book. Every sentence was like an exquisite story all by itself. I guess I don'Zing, zing, zing...this novel gripped me in exactly the way I love in a book. Every sentence was like an exquisite story all by itself. I guess I don't need conventional plot to be completely captivated, when a story feels so true. I loved it....more
Maylis de Kerangal's novel The Heart was perfectly told. The story itself was very simple, and that is what made perfection possible, and de Kerangal Maylis de Kerangal's novel The Heart was perfectly told. The story itself was very simple, and that is what made perfection possible, and de Kerangal never tried to oversell me or inflate the story to be bigger than it was.
Painting Time feels so much more ambitious and it isn't perfect but it is very interesting. The style itself (a blended voice between author and translator, in this case, as I'm reading it in Jessica Moore's English translation) is breathless and break-less and filled with forward momentum. Sometimes I felt as if the author missed a chance to allow us readers to pause and reflect, but for the most part I enjoyed the language almost more than the story itself--it swept me along.
Like this:
"The discovery, already, is a wound--Paula pauses, she doesn't let go of the phone, but slips off her shoes, her socks, and climbs onto the bed--the outside and the inside open to each other through a hole that is scooped out--it's about twenty centimeters wide on the day of the discovery, and five by five meters only a month later--and through this contact, something is irreversibly lost. When the cone of loose scree is destroyed, the cavity loses its climatic, hydric, and thermic stopper, and the stability of the environment inside the cave is changed--the exact relation that existed between the air, water, and stone is disturbed, and a continuity of twenty thousand years collapses."
It make sense in context. But you need to pay attention. Reading this novel is like swimming underwater a little longer than you imagine is possible and then the air when you get to the other side is so sweet....more
The Magic Mountain isn't just a book to me. It's also a beloved destination.
Is it my favorite book (and favorite destination) of all time? Maybe. I juThe Magic Mountain isn't just a book to me. It's also a beloved destination.
Is it my favorite book (and favorite destination) of all time? Maybe. I just spent 6 weeks listening to the glorious new audiobook narrated by David Rintoul and it was maybe the best 37 hours, 27 minutes I've ever spent....more
What a book. Is it a novel about a journey through a dystopian hell-scape? No. This particular hell-scape is in the real world and it has a veracity tWhat a book. Is it a novel about a journey through a dystopian hell-scape? No. This particular hell-scape is in the real world and it has a veracity that gripped me from the first pages. A thirty-five year old teacher in eastern Ukraine, a man who has tried his best to keep his head down and to pretend life will go on as always even as the terror of war engulfs his town, goes on a trip to retrieve his nephew from a care facility in now-occupied territory. He makes this trip not from any sense of heroism, but because, at the start of his journey, he just can't grasp how terrible things are going to get. How lawless and unnatural and uncivilized things are about to get. The accumulation of detail is stunning and harrowing, I would say the prose is "beautiful" but it's not over-pretty in any way--it's perfect, it's immersive, and it never veers from the understanding and experiences of one man as he navigates a senseless landscape and tries to hold on. The reading experience reminds me somewhat of Imre Kertész's novel Fatelessness for the way it focuses relentlessly on one person's experience, and through that narrow lens, it reveals so much more. This novel is a must read for both its literary masterfulness and its historical/contemporary significance....more
This is an exhilarating read--each sentence brings me to an unexpected place, whether it be into the lives of three newly released prisoners, or insidThis is an exhilarating read--each sentence brings me to an unexpected place, whether it be into the lives of three newly released prisoners, or inside the head of a wounded bird, or in the shoes of a phobic clown. My only other experience of reading Antoine Volodine was with the exhilarating, maddening post-nuclear-apocalypse (maybe) story RADIANT TERMINUS. I would say that SOLO VIOLA is a similar read, for the way it bombards me with sense impressions as I read along, until I'm feeling many emotions, the chief among them being a profound sense of grief. I have no idea if this is the intention of the author but it's what happened to me. I was wrung out after reading this brief novel. I'm indifferent to the superstructure of stories and personae and contradictions that make up the Antoine Volodine mythos--this novel fortunately stands on its own....more
Perfect. Incredible. It's stunningly violent, but in a way that didn't repel me--in fact it made me want to bite into the warm throat of a living animPerfect. Incredible. It's stunningly violent, but in a way that didn't repel me--in fact it made me want to bite into the warm throat of a living animal and feel its blood run down my chin. Okay. So this feeling is maybe not for everyone, but in my case it is exactly what i needed right now.
The novel is also one of the few I've read where the author finds a convincing, fascinating, gripping first-person voice for a young character, for a child. The voice is alchemy here. The narrator is an adult, telling a story of her childhood, a story that has already happened and is far in the past for her now, but there is no hint of an adult's wisdom mixing in and messing with the pure childlike vision, or the confusion, of the child's story. The narrator remembers exactly what it felt like to be that child and she doesn't let a breath of nostalgia or judgment about her young self creep in. It's masterful.
It's not for everyone, certainly. Most people I know will hate it. But however violent, I found the novel almost purely redemptive. It's like the story of the Passion: there is sin, and there is sacrifice, and there is atonement, and there is absolution. Yeah.
I was exhilarated by this work. I'm not sure what it is. Is it a poem? An essay? A barbaric yawp? I moved forward through the text cautiously, not knoI was exhilarated by this work. I'm not sure what it is. Is it a poem? An essay? A barbaric yawp? I moved forward through the text cautiously, not knowing how to protect myself from my own wild thoughts bouncing off the words on the page. I pretty much loved it. I was confused by it. I was annoyingly disturbed by questions about whether the hard-breaks in the text were meant to be there or were some artifact of me reading this book in digital ARC form, and on a first-gen IPad.
The publisher's description says "the narrative, the essayistic and the magical is organically woven together into a literary text that both genre-wise and by virtue of its content refuses to be boxed in" and that sentence really sums up what I think about this novel, at this moment--because this description from the publisher is irksomely UNGRAMMATICAL (please, dear verso, its 'the narrative, the essayistic and the magical _ARE_ organically woven together) and yet, with work on my part, the publisher's description also seems to mean something exactly like this novel means.
I feel like I was in communion with the semi-raw/half-baked thinking of a very interesting human being who is Jenny Hval.
Good. Try it. I'm going to buy it in book form when it's available so I can at least be sure where the author means to make her line breaks vs. being continuously bemused about whether there is any meaning at all to them, as they appeared in the ARC....more
I adored the experience of reading this novel. It's such a deeply sensory experience to read, and such a deep dive into a first-person voice that is iI adored the experience of reading this novel. It's such a deeply sensory experience to read, and such a deep dive into a first-person voice that is incantatory and surreal, and maybe insane. For the most part I had no idea what was going on, and I didn't care.
I want other people to read this novel so I can ask them what they experienced while reading it. The back-cover copy promises "a meditation on memory and forgetting, creation, and oblivion," which sounds about right, but I'd add to that description a delicate powdering of "ecstatic revelation." It's the kind of book that compelled me to read it through in a "wow"-like stupor, and then, when I was done, I opened the pages at random to read solo sentences in isolation, because they were each so evocative and strange. It's tangentially about a big old smelly mushroom, by the way. And, it's sort of a love story. The mushroom is referred to with she/her pronouns and I hope she's okay with that. She communicates in ways more olfactory than verbal. If this were longer it might have become too challenging because there is just so much of "what is going on" I can take in my fiction but at 176 pages this was just right. I will quote a blurb from the back now, because for once the blurb is right: "A singular novel."
This is my third work of fiction published by Bellevue Literary Press and they are a new favorite. In each case the novel I read was like nothing I'd read before, and I was left grateful that Bellevue Literary Press took the leap of faith to bring these books into the world....more
Tyll is so entertaining that I struggled at first to understand just how deep it is. I'm not sure what it says about contemporary literature, or aboutTyll is so entertaining that I struggled at first to understand just how deep it is. I'm not sure what it says about contemporary literature, or about me, that I needed to consciously banish my cynical mistrust of any book that is so delightful to read.
As I read the novel I thought of Falstaff, Shakespeare's comic-yet-deep repeating character. The character who most reminded me of Falstaff is played by a donkey, a character who appears in many scenes, sometimes for comic value and sometimes for something else entirely.
And now that I've brought it up, I realize that I could write several paragraphs just about the donkey in this novel--how funny the donkey is in a given scene, and then how horrifically the donkey's fate plays out in another scene. Sometimes this donkey has a name, and its name is Origenes. And like so much in Tyll, Kehlmann invites me to think of the donkey's name as just a name, and to read on, or alternatively, to ponder what shimmering potentials are added to my reading if I take time to realize "Origenes" is also the name of an itinerant third-century Christian ascetic whose life and fate were caught up in religious disputes not unlike those raging in this novel.
The donkey's story is threaded throughout this broken, nonlinear novel, and always brings with it some new wonder or terror or sadness or revelation, even though it's a minor character, like Falstaff. And the thing is, it's not just the donkey. Every character in the novel is a kind of itinerant bit player, and every one of them--the miller Claus, the Winter King, the expert in dragonology, the little girl named Martha, Tyll himself--has a marvelous and mysterious story to tell, when it's their time on stage. Kehlmann made them all real for me, sometimes in just a few sentences.
References to Shakespeare plays appear throughout this novel with both historical and thematic resonances. A recurring side-theme is how literature was changing in this period of history that we now call "early-modern." The play Macbeth makes its way into a scene as a way to reference James I's rise to power, and Macbeth's last soliloquy is a good description of how this novel unfurls as you read it:
Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
So here we are. Apparently my second stab at coming to grips with Tyll here on Goodreads is going to consist of a little bit of Shakespeare, a little bit of donkey.
Okay. I should also add that I found a lot of Lutheran-like philosophy playing out in profound ways--over and over again the character Tyll projects a belief that suffering and uncertainty is worth enduring for the hope of living through it, and that evil is worth fighting, for the hope of the good to come. This philosophy is most starkly portrayed in the late chapter "In the Shaft."
Well, I'm just gob-smacked by this novel. Read it....more
This was a harrowing read for me, even though the tone is flat and simple. In the first scene an 11 year old girl watches a soldier murder everyone shThis was a harrowing read for me, even though the tone is flat and simple. In the first scene an 11 year old girl watches a soldier murder everyone she knows; after the carnage, the soldier suddenly decides to desert his post and to take the place of those he murdered, because he's tired of the war and wants to be a farmer. He coerces the surviving girl to play the part of his daughter, and as the novel progresses their relationship evolves in surprising ways.
The story reminded me a great deal of An Untouched House by Willem Frederik Hermans, for the way it shows how incessant violence warps and shatters any kind of natural human feeling. Unlike Hilbig's novel, though, this story focuses on a child's perceptions of war, which made the story all the more disturbing to me.
The writing is very flat. It mimics the passing musings of a child playing with her dolls, or worrying about what to wear on any given day, or what the rules of decorum are for a proper 11 year old girl...only the events witnessed by this child are horrific.
There is a level of abstraction to the story that took some getting used to. It's a fictional war held in a fictional valley. Somehow this abstraction didn't distance me from the human happenings, though. Instead, it felt like an appropriate tone to remind me of how war brings with it the relentless, relentlessly casual, and nearly abstract murder of others. The detached tone felt right, in that people in war will detach from horrific events as a way to cope....more
A pregnant woman answers a knock on the front door; it's a younger woman, who tells the pregnant woman that the father of her unborn child has raped hA pregnant woman answers a knock on the front door; it's a younger woman, who tells the pregnant woman that the father of her unborn child has raped her. It seems like a promisingly charged premise for a story beginning, but the novel is set in a place so clinical and abstract that reading it felt more like I was reading a case study than a novel.
I'm also reminded (once again) that I can no longer tolerate reading stories written from the point-of-view of a skeezy man, which alternating chapters are, here. I'm done with that....more
What a satisfying read. Nothing happens, in the most fascinating way imaginable. Just as I wrote that last sentence I remembered the feeling of watchiWhat a satisfying read. Nothing happens, in the most fascinating way imaginable. Just as I wrote that last sentence I remembered the feeling of watching My Dinner with Andre for the first time. This novel gave me a similar feeling--happy to be alive, happy to be literate, happy to have time to read and to think. It's that kind of book....more
July 2023 note: I complained about the prose in my original review when I read it in English. Stupid me. I'm listening to the audiobook in German now July 2023 note: I complained about the prose in my original review when I read it in English. Stupid me. I'm listening to the audiobook in German now and it's clear and stark and beautifully realized by Jens Harzer. More to come. Original review below.
Without a doubt the prose in this translated novel goes clunkety-clunk and sometimes stops altogether in a flurry of authorial interference on the page, written to make sure that I as a reader know what to think. But once i put all these objections in a box, what I'm left with is an extraordinary work, to be sure more historical artifact than novel, that captures a culture at the tipping point of losing its soul.
The metaphorical layers are perfect to the historic moment. It might at first feel like a blunt tool to use Goethe's play Faust, written in part as an Enlightenment manifesto, as a metaphor for Nazism's rise. But Mann isn't going for subtle, here. This book feels driven by heartbreak and urgency.
So while I didn't love the execution, and may actually feel I'll like the movie better once I see it, I loved it for its passionate conviction and its truth-saying....more
This novella is a relentless, compulsive, driven, and desperate story of two young women whose good intentions lead them to make ever more terrible chThis novella is a relentless, compulsive, driven, and desperate story of two young women whose good intentions lead them to make ever more terrible choices. The way I experienced reading this novel reminded me of reading "Of Mice and Men"...it's a claustrophobic reading experience, where you know from the first few sentences the story is going to end badly, but you keep reading because the story and the situation feel true and important.
Wieringa brings alive the way his characters, second-generation women of dual Dutch and Moroccan citizenship, find themselves feeling culturally stateless, even though they both have two passports. They feel unwelcome in the Netherlands, the country where they were born. And yet when they travel to Morocco, the people immediately sense their foreignness and treat them as outsiders. The women are unprepared for the culture shock. They have naively believed that they would fit in. They're unable to take care of themselves. They are appalled by the economic disparity between the country they just left and the country they have traveled to. Their desire to belong leads them to make a disastrous series of decisions.
One reason I wanted to read The Death of Murat Idrissi was to see how a Dutch white male author approaches a story about two young Dutch women of Moroccan descent. He pulls it off masterfully. Wieringa's story is utterly sensitive to the experience of recent immigrants. A single, subtle paragraph is all Wieringa needs to establish how much harder these young women's lives became as Arab Muslim children growing up in the Netherlands after 9/11. Indeed, the women's dual citizenship, and their conflicting sense of self, play a key role, a true role I think, in making Wieringa's story so plausible and so affecting. ...more
Some people are going to love this book. There are many brief scenes of exquisite and particular wonder, and the characters are deeply lovable. For inSome people are going to love this book. There are many brief scenes of exquisite and particular wonder, and the characters are deeply lovable. For instance there is a scene of a woman hand-making felt from wool, a scene that is full of physicality, and with the joy of making things by hand, and it's one of my favorite scenes I've read this year. There are many lovely windows like this into the lives of these characters.
Where the novel fails for me is in its absolute and relentless dependence on far-fetched coincidence to drive the story. Fiction is strangely immune to an "it could happen in real life" argument. Even though by definition a made-up thing, good fiction actually has a higher standard for consistency, and for cause-and-effect, than real life has. For coincidence to work in fiction, the coincidental event needs to happen once, preferably at the beginning of the story. Even then the author is left with a big challenge to make a fictional story work when it depends on coincidence.
Ahava here seems determined to be the exception to the good-fiction rule and to make coincidence-upon-coincidence work as a plot device. It didn't work for me....more
The book is an account of a horrific chain of events that in fact happened to the author, who survived Dachau.
But it is also unabashedly subjective: The book is an account of a horrific chain of events that in fact happened to the author, who survived Dachau.
But it is also unabashedly subjective: part-memoir, part fiction, a mix of first- and third-person accounts, and in no way trying to hold itself up as 'the truth,' and it's told in a non-linear, fractured manner, in four broken parts where even the protagonist/author's name is different from one section to the next.
I realize that what I just wrote contradicts itself. If something "in fact happened," then it's not "subjective," or usually it isn't, anyway.
In fact, the author contradicts herself many times about what is true and not-true, right here in the text:
There is a fact that I evaded. By so often saying that i had been deported to Dachau, I ended up believing it. But it's not true. My companions were transferred to that Lager. Not me. I was repatriated.
As I read this book I began to think about how different it was from the shaped memory of Night by Elie Wiesel, a book in which each scene is written novelistically; a book that Wiesel called his true experience.
Wiesel's truth is presented in a more polished way for the reader than Deviation, though. Wiesel's people die in well-written ways, with the tools of fiction vivifying each scene, as in this passage about three Jews who are hanged:
Both adults were already dead. The noose had choked them at once. Instantly they expired. Their extended tongues were red as fire. Only the slight Jewish child with the lost dreamy eyes was still alive. His body weighed too little. Was too light. The noose didn't catch. The slow death of the little meshoresl took thirty-five minutes. And we saw him wobbling, swaying, on the rope, with his bluish-red tongue extended, with a prayer on his grey-white lips, a prayer to God...When we saw him like that, the hanged child, many of us didn't want to, couldn't keep from crying.
In Deviation there is no such scene-building, no use of metaphor, and very little reportage of how witnesses felt to see others brutalized and killed. There is a flatness in the storytelling, frequently to the point where I felt detached from the brutalizing deaths of victims portrayed. It could be that this detachment is closer to the "truth" of what survivors felt when they witnessed so much senseless death all around them. It could be that Wiesel's emotionally vivid scene-building where survivors cry and pray to God gives readers solace, though, and reminds readers of the truth that human lives were lost, and in that way Night provides another kind of truth--truth with a bit of hope in it, maybe.
In Deviation people come and go, events seem utterly random, and what is significant and what is meaningless blend together. By consistently calling attention to itself as subjective, and by refusing to mold itself into a narrative or to use Bildungsroman structural elements, it remains deeply unsatisfying in some ways. It's a lot of work to read this book. Without fictional and scenic props to pull me along, it could be tedious. I find Night much more heart-rending because it's full of the tools of fiction to drive its messages into our hearts. But D'Eramo's kind of storytelling offers an alternative that might bring us closer to the truth of an author's own experience....more
Whenever I read a book in its original German I recall Simon Armitage's introduction to his magnificent translation of Sir Gawain and the Green KnightWhenever I read a book in its original German I recall Simon Armitage's introduction to his magnificent translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, where Armitage wrote: "it is as if the poem is lying beneath a thin coat of ice, tantalisingly near yet frustratingly blurred." My German comprehension is not complete unless I read slow, and I need to stop completely now and then to suss out a sentence. But for this book I wanted to read steady. I wanted to encounter this long essay of a book in a way that was free of interruption. I discovered far more that was tantalizingly near than what was frustrating.
The whole of this book fascinates me. Both the book and its author seem ready to drop from our collective memory. Even in Germany the latest reprint on Amazon.de has just one review--someone wrote to report that he needs to keep buying it for his 88 year old mom, who loves it and keeps giving it away to her friends.
Onto the book itself, which is a melancholy mix of humor and wisdom and sadness.
It begins with a long anecdote about an Englishman in the news who left a note that he had committed suicide because he felt oppressed by the boredom of everyday life--he had decided to hang himself, he said in his note, because it had become too stupid and too boring to put on the clothes every morning that he had taken off the night before. During the last forty-five years of his life he calculated he had performed these actions 6425 times and could not see any point in continuing to do so.
It seems a grim way to begin, but then the essay soars in unexpected ways--or maybe entirely expected ways given that it was written in the rubble of WWII--to explore how fragile normalcy is. That normal boring lives can open at any moment and hurl us into chaos where the search for the firm ground of our existence is our most fragile hope. Between the superficially normal and the helplessly chaotic, human life moves.
This book is about a lot of other things. Including Uncle Hinrich's chicken farm. It reminded me a good deal of the best of Erich Kästner, another German author whose oeuvre spanned from children's books to meditative essays, and who lived longer than Bürgel did, and who had the good fortune of being discovered by Hollywood and his books made into films before he died....more
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